Raspberry Pi Pico is based on Raspberry Pi-designed silicon
Distributor Farnell, an Avnet company, offers the first product built on Raspberry Pi-designed silicon, the Raspberry Pi Pico. The high performance, $4.00 development kit is also designed to be incorporated into a range of professional microcontroller applications.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is built around the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. According to Farnell, the flexible, low cost development platform can also be directly deployed into end products, reducing time to market. The RP2040 offers high performance for integer workloads, a large on-chip memory, and a wide range of I/O options, adds Farnell.
As well as hobbyists and makers, professional design engineers who are already familiar with Raspberry Pi will appreciate the use and affordability of the Raspberry Pi Pico, adds the company.
The Raspberry Pi Pico has 264kbyte of on-chip SRAM and 2Mbyte of on-board QSPI flash memory. The on-board power supply generates 3.3V for the RP2040 operation and external circuitry. It has a wide input voltage range (1.8V to 5.5V); designers can select the preferred power source.
Drag and drop programming is via a micro-USB and there is a three-pin serial wire debug (SWD) for interactive debugging. Also includes is a comprehensive C software development kit, a mature MicroPython port, examples and documentation.
There are 26 general purpose I/O pins, three of which can be used as analogue inputs. There are 0.1-inch through-hole pads with castellated edges for surface mount assembly.
The RP2040 microcontroller features two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 133MHz, 264kbyte of on-chip SRAM, 30 multi-function general purpose I/O pins. There is dedicated hardware for commonly used peripherals and a programmable I/O sub-system for extended peripheral support. It also includes a four-channel ADC with internal temperature sensor and built-in USB 1.1 with host and device support.
James Adams, chief operating officer, Raspberry Pi Trading, said: “This is the start of an exciting new era for Raspberry Pi. With Raspberry Pi Pico, and RP2040, we have been able to draw on insights drawn from a decade of using other vendors’ microcontrollers, and to create an innovative silicon platform for our customers.”
Farnell is the largest manufacturer and distributor of the Raspberry Pi and has sold more than 15 million units to date. Farnell stocks the complete range of Raspberry Pi single board computers, enabling customers to build a wide range of devices for home, professional, education or commercial use. Customers can also benefit from 24/5 technical support alongside free access to valuable online resources on the Farnell website, and engineering and maker community element14.
Farnell customers will be able to purchase the Raspberry Pi Pico from the website from today.
